North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, left, embraces South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, at the Military Demarcation Line that divides their countries ahead of their meeting at the official summit Peace House building at the truce village of Panmunjom on April 27, 2018. (Getty)Getty Images

The Korean War is not over, of course, because no peace treaty was ever signed when the fighting came to an end through armistice in 1953.

It’s just in a stall mode, albeit a long one.

When North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un walked across the border last week to have denuclearization talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, editors of this newspaper would have loved to have seen its founding editor, Peter Worthington, walk into the newsroom and his way to his cluttered office in the back, and bang out a column on what it all means to the world.

Worthington didn’t just know about the Korean War, he fought in it.

Over the years, Korea was called the Forgotten War, as it followed so close to the end of the Second World War. But it wasn’t so forgotten to the 26,000 Canadians like Worthington who served there, the 17 countries that contributed fighting soldiers or the 63 other nations that provided support.

A North Korean soldier, right, looks south through binoculars as a South Korean soldier, left, stands guard at the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone on Sept. 25, 2013.Lee Jin-man /
AP

The United Nations tried to save face as Europe recovered from the death and the bombing by calling Korea nothing more than a police action.

It was not.

The last column Peter Worthington wrote on Korea was in April 2013, a month before he died at the age of 86.

The man was still at the top of his game.

Here is the lead paragraph of that column on Korea:

“Conventional wisdom is Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s nutbar leader, has inadvertently painted himself into a corner by threatening thermonuclear war with South Korea and the U.S. Some corner!”

Worthington wrote of how Kim had already forced then-U.S. president Barack Obama to back down three times and warned that Obama would be unable to “indefinitely continue a policy of subservience and timidity.”

His conclusion? “A little bashing of North Korea might encourage some common sense in Pyongyang,” he wrote. “It’s about time Kim Jong Un got a taste of reality.”

As usual, Worthington was right.

Exit Obama two years later, and in walks U.S. President Donald Trump.

On Jan. 2, Trump logged onto his Twitter account once again.

“North Korean leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘nuclear button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food-starved regime please inform him that I too have a nuclear button,” he tweeted.

“But mine is much bigger and more powerful that his, and my button works!”

Well, consider Kim Jong Un informed.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

Just hours after Kim became the first North Korean leader to cross into South Korea, a declaration was issued promising military arms reduction, the end of “hostile acts,” and their fortified border becoming a “peace zone.”

While the declaration was light on substance, it was a gate-opener for Trump’s upcoming summit. He will fly to Korea to discuss what will happen to the arsenal of nuclear weapons Kim has been provocatively testing and claims to have perfected.

Trump, who once threatened Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury,” was now tweeting, “Korean War to end! The United States, and all its great people, should be very proud of what’s taking place in Korea.”

It’s still early days, of course, and only 65 years since that peninsula was cut in two.

Dwight Eisenhower was U.S. president back then, Louis St. Laurent Canada’s prime minister.

And Peter Worthington was about to be discharged from Korea, where he had served as platoon commander, a battalion intelligence officer and a parachute jockey with the U.S. air force’s 6147 Mosquito Squadron.

Once back in Canada, he returned to university, and eventually got into newspapering where he fit the bill like no other.

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